John 1:1-18Every year, more than a million people gather in Times Square in New York City for the annual Ball Drop that begins at 11:59 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. Many millions more watch on television, while others party in the new year in their respective downtowns, hotels, and homes. It’s the most raucous holiday of the year. If you look only at the surface of the New Year’s celebrations and New Year’s dissipations you might not recognize that underneath it all is a deep hunger and thirst in the human soul for a fresh start, a new beginning.
A couple years ago, a few days before Christmas, I was helping one of my sons change a flat tire on his truck in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. To tell you the truth, I was enjoying myself. I’m not a fan of flat tires, mind you; but once your son leaves home for college, even changing a flat tire together can feel like “quality time” with each other. We weren’t quite finished when we were approached by a man in his late 30s or early 40s asking for a meal. He said he was embarrassed to ask for help, and he didn’t want money. But he said he was an out-of-work construction worker, and he had four mouths to feed; and if I would buy him supper, he would sure be grateful to me. I confess to you that my first thought was “Can’t you see you’re interrupting a father-son thing here? Leave us alone.” Then I thought to myself, “Go scam someone else, man. I don’t have time for this, and your supper is not in my budget.” Not to mention the fact that we were in the parking lot of a burger joint and he wanted dinner for four from the chicken place a half a mile away. Right.
But it was a couple days before Christmas, and he sure enough looked as though he was down on his luck. And he didn’t ask for cash, and I thought about what I would want somebody to do for my son if he was ever out of work with four mouths to feed. And besides, it had only been about ten days or so since I had preached a sermon about God being in the business of filling the hungry with good things, as the gospel of Luke puts it (Luke 1:53; 6:21). So the next thing I knew, I was standing at the counter of that chicken place buying dinner to go for four. I still don’t know whether I got scammed or whether I actually helped someone; but on the way to the chicken place, the fellow I bought dinner for said this: “I’ll be glad when this year is over. I sure hope next year is better than this one was.”
Have you ever felt that way at the end of one year and the beginning of the next? At one time or another in our lives, every one of us experiences the deep need to turn the calendar to a new year. Sooner or later, every one of us comes to a place in our lives where we need a fresh start, a new beginning.
New beginnings are different from New Year’s resolutions. For one thing, the need for a new beginning doesn’t always coincide with a new year. The circumstances of our lives, the conditions of our hearts, and the movement of our souls—not the calendar—determine the timing of our need for a new beginning. For another thing, a new beginning is a fresh start, a clean slate. It’s not just a list of a few new things that you’re going to do or old things you’re going to stop doing. It’s starting all over again.
On the morning of my father’s funeral, my mother walked into the den of the church parsonage where my parents were living when my father died and asked those of us sitting there, “You know what song I’ve been singing since I woke up this morning?” We didn’t even try to name that tune. She said, “I’ve been singing, ‘I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair.’” Nellie’s song from the Broadway musical, South Pacific. That was more than 25 years ago, and there is still an occasional night when she calls his name in her sleep. But she recognized that morning that she had arrived at a “starting-all-over” moment in her life. A new beginning.
New beginnings are a lot harder than New Year’s resolutions, but they last a lot longer. New beginnings are also more biblical than New Year’s resolutions. God called Abraham and Sarah out of the Ur of the Chaldees to a new beginning in Canaan. God called the Israelites up out of Egypt to a new beginning in a land of promise. God called the exiles home from Babylon to a new beginning in Jerusalem. God called Peter away from his nets on the Sea of Galilee to a new beginning as an apostle fishing for people. God called Nicodemus away from his life as a Pharisee to a new beginning, “born from above” or “born again.” God called Saul of Tarsus from persecuting the Way to a new beginning as the greatest champion of the Way.
And then there’s the biblical new beginning in verse 14 of this morning’s gospel lesson: “The Word became flesh and lived among us . . . full of grace and truth.” The Word that was in the beginning, the Word that was with God and the Word that was God, the Word through whom all things were made, the source of all beginnings, began anew when the Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth. That new beginning—the “incarnation,” it’s called in theological jargon—is the ground of all our new beginnings. Incarnational new beginnings—not merely resolutions—are necessarily “full of grace and truth.”
Grace has to do with letting go of what has been. Grace is about letting go of what has been in order to embrace what yet can be. That’s what God’s grace does: God lets go of our has-been in order to embrace the yet-can-be in us. Let me be very clear about what grace is not. Grace is not a “do-over.” There is no such thing as a do-over. What you’ve done, you’ve done; and what you left undone, you’ve left undone. There is no such thing as a do-over; but there is do better. There is do wiser. There is do new. And in order to do better and wiser and new, you have to let go of what has been: good, bad, or indifferent. Just as by grace God let go of our sin, we must let go of our guilt, our loss, our pain, our grief, our anger, our disappointment—our own or others. Whatever it is about the past that you are dragging with you into the present, you must let that go. Grace is washing what has been out of your hair to start a new day or a new year fresh and clean and anew. That’s what new beginnings take: Grace.
And truth also. Truth has to do with recognizing in the present that nothing less than a new beginning will do. Tony Compolo tells the story (Let Me Tell You a Story, p. 96) of an old guy in the backwoods of Kentucky who could always be counted on to show up at revival meetings whenever an evangelist came to town. At the end of each service when the invitation was given, he would come down the aisle, get down on his knees, raise his arms to heaven and cry out, “Fill, Jesus! Fill me! Fill me, Jesus!” Then, within a week or two after the revival was over, he would slip back into his old ways of living. But when the next round of revival meetings was held, he would once again show up, walk down the aisle, and pray the same prayer over and over. One time, he was down on his knees yelling to the ceiling, “Fill me! Fill me, Jesus! Fill me, fill me! Fill me, Jesus!” when suddenly from the back of the church a lady called out, “Don’t do it, Lord! He leaks!” The truth is, of course, we all leak. If you only have a small leak, and all you need is a minor tune-up, then making a few New Year’s resolutions will do for you. But if what you need is an overhaul, a rebuild, a restoration, a spiritual “make-over,” if you will, then the truth is, nothing less than a new beginning will do.
It wasn’t enough for Abraham and Sarah to make a few New Year’s resolutions in Ur of the Chaldees and then a few weeks later just go on with things as they were where they were. It wasn’t enough for the Israelites in Egypt or Babylon, either one, to make a few New Year’s resolutions and keep on living where they were as they were. It wasn’t enough for Nicodemus or for Peter or for Saul to resolve to do a few things a little differently. In every case, it required an entirely new beginning. And truth is what it takes to recognize that the game you have been playing, the life you have been living, the circumstances of the present, are no longer viable as a vehicle to carry you to a healthy, sustainable, and redemptive future in right relationship with God, in right relationship with others, and in right relationship with yourself. Only a new beginning will do.
When “the Word became flesh and lived among us. . . full of grace and truth,” it opened up to you and to me and to the world the ever-present possibility of a new beginning. The gospel of Jesus Christ is all about new beginnings. The gospel is about “new life,” Paul says in Romans 7:6, and “a new creation,” he says in 2 Corinthians 5:17. The gospel is “new wine,” a “new garment,” a “new covenant” (Luke 5:36-37; 22:20). The gospel is about “a new self,” according to Ephesians 4:24. And God knows, every one of us needs a new self at least once in our lives; and some of us discover once is not enough for us.
No matter how many New Year’s resolutions we may make, our life remains soiled; our creation is spoiled; our covenant becomes tattered; our garment is torn; our wine becomes tasteless; and our self gets tarnished. The problem with New Year’s resolutions is that they are a self-help enterprise. And the problem with “self-help” is that it just doesn’t work. Have you ever thought about why it is that “self-help” books are a billion-dollar business? It’s because self-help doesn’t work. If self-help worked, you could buy one good self-help book, and you’d be done. But have you noticed how those of us who buy self-help books can’t buy just one? It’s like those potato chips: you can’t eat just one. You have to have another and another and another because self-help can’t create a new self. It only nurtures the deep hunger and thirst of the human soul for a new beginning.
The new beginning that leads to a new self can only come when the hunger and thirst on our inside is met by the nourishment we need from the outside. Think about it. When you are hungry, your body can feed on itself. In the short-term, your body feeds on itself by burning the fat it has stored up in order to keep itself alive and functioning. And when you are hungry, your body can feed on itself by devouring the muscle you have built in order to keep itself alive and functioning. But your body cannot feed on itself forever. Sooner or later, your body must receive nourishment from the outside—protein and carbohydrates and nutrients—that will restore the muscle and replenish the fat reserves that your body can live on but for only so long. Like body, like soul.
The words of Jesus later in the gospel of John express this biological and spiritual reality when Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry” (John 6:35). Jesus said, “those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14). How can that be? Never hungry? Never thirsty? We don’t know any condition of the human body or the human soul in this life in which hunger and thirst are permanently satisfied.
But here’s the thing. It’s not one-and-done. It’s not eat and never eat again. It’s not drink and never drink again. It is the constant, saving presence of Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, “God is with us,” feeding our hunger and satisfying our thirst, offering us again and again and again the bread of life and the cup of new life, the spiritual food that nourishes our souls the way physical food nourishes our bodies. New beginnings come from the outside in, not the inside out.
Look at John 1:12 in this morning’s gospel lesson. There are three biblical steps to a new beginning in John 1:12. “To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” I want you to see the three steps in the three verbs in that sentence: received, believed, to become. The first step in a new beginning is to receive—to receive the constant, saving presence of the Lord Jesus Christ in your life, whether it is for the first time or for the hundredth time to receive—the bread of life and the spring of water gushing up to eternal life. It is God’s initiative, not ours, that opens us to the possibility of a new beginning when we open ourselves to God in Jesus Christ to receive God’s constant, saving presence in our life, guiding, sustaining, directing, correcting us on our way. The first step is to receive.
The second step is to believe. Notice that we don’t receive because we believe. A lot of people have it backwards. A lot of believers and unbelievers alike misrepresent the Christian faith as an act of believing that leads to receiving. From the book of Genesis to the book of Revelation, the Bible could not be more clear that we don’t receive because we believe. We believe because we have received. In Genesis 15:5-6, Abraham received the promise of a future from God: God brought Abraham outside his tent “and said, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then [God] said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ And [Abraham] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” Abraham received, and then he believed. The apostle Paul put it this way in Romans 5:8: “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” We all received the promise of salvation in Jesus Christ long before any of us believed it. Believing comes from receiving, not the other way around.
The redemptive new beginning of the Christian faith germinates and takes root and sprouts and grows in the darkness of doubt and sin and guilt and loss and pain and grief and anger and disappointment whenever and wherever we come to the recognition that God has already provided all we need to address the hunger and thirst on our inside, so that when we receive, we believe.
And when we believe, we become. “To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” If grace is about letting go of the past, and truth is about recognizing in the present that nothing less than a new beginning will do, then “the power to become” is the God-given capacity to step into the future of a new beginning with God, in God, for God.
Oddly enough, it just might be that the people who understand best what a new beginning is are those folks among us who play video games. In a video game, there comes a point when the screen is filled by the words, “GAME OVER.” If you want to keep on playing, there’s nothing else to do but to start an entirely new game, begin an entirely new life. A new beginning is a “game over”/“start new game” moment. By the mercy of God, revealed in Jesus the Christ, by grace and truth, any new day can begin a brand new year when you decide to receive, to believe, and to become. This New Year’s Day can be that day for you. Any day in this new year can be that day for you. The invitation of God in Jesus Christ is open now to you to receive, to believe, and to become.
Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
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